BabyBillyFreeman

omg that's genius! I had no idea you could run "additional apps" this way for emulators in LB- this is exactly what I was looking for the other day! Thanks for sharing that gold!

ahhhhhhh ok I think I'm starting to understand the paradigm here; let me see if I understand now: as long as the files (dinput8.dll, devreorder.ini) are in the same dir as your emulator exe (i.e. Retroarch), everytime I run RA in this example, RA will "see" my controllers (4x arcade sticks in my case) in the order I dictate in the devreorder.ini; as long as I take my preferred list/order and place it under [order] like this: I of course need to correct the GUID numbers in my screenshot! if I do this for all my emus, this will be the case? do you know if this only works for some emus and not others? I guess I can test and cross fingers; because I have a huge LB build with about 8,500 games across a lot of emulators (i.e. MAME, Retroarch, OpenBOR, MUGEN, RPCS3, the list goes on!) the way I understand it, if I use JoyToKey, it will only work as long as JoyToKey is running- which means I'd have to manually run J2K with Launchbox/BigBox somehow....I wonder if there's a way to have LB launch (no pun intended!) "additional apps" like you can with individual games?... Thanks for helping me wrap my head around these new concepts to me!

Ok I got it working, a friend actually told me that Joy To Key has options to choose the order of your connected controllers, I haven't tested it to see if it works, but this is what those options look like: I'm not sure if this does the same thing as your script but in another way? This is all new to me and I'm learning a lot, fast- but feels like everytime I solve a problem and get a win- 3 more new problems appear and it never ends hahah! Additional question for you, with your script, when you select a controller "index" for like player one, what happens to the other players? For example, today I booted my arcade pedestal (runs on Win11) and all my 4 players were scrambled (i.e. P2 became P1, P3 became P2, etc.). I can use your script to switch the real life P1 to the correct P1 arcade stick in Win11- but does that mean that P2 = P2, P3 = P3, etc. automatically? How would you tell your script "hey now that you made the P1 blue arcade stick P1 in Windows, let's fix the other 3 players..." Does that make sense? I was drinking a lot of rum last night so maybe my brain is just scrambled and I'm thinking too much about this...

sorry just came up with another question, in your post you mention: but I don't see DeviceLister.exe in your zip file, what could I be missing?

quick question, what is the ahk file for? dont think I saw it mentioned in your original post?

I just built a 4 player arcade pedestal running on a Win11 mini PC- and I had everything working until I learned of this design flaw from Windows! soooo frustrating! I got lucky on my first try when I booted everything up and all 4 players were by freak chance setup correctly, was like that all weekend. Then today I rebooted and connected a new bluetooth keyboard and mouse and everything got screwed up- I knew it couldn't be that easy! Thanks for making these scripts, I'm going to test them out and see how they work. If you have any suggestions or advice please let me know!

HA!! Man these days I have almost no time to play any games- the irony is I make games in my day job!!! Games are what got me into a game dev career; I was obsessed with NES, Genesis, etc when I was a kid, my parents hated it and always told me it would rot my brain. Now making games is my career, and yes I still enjoy sticking it to them and rubbing it in to this day LOL Gonna go ahead and order one of the pedestal kits from GRS today, gonna be epic!

Thanks @JoeViking245 removing that command line allowed MAME to launch! The only minor issue is that my gamepad stopped working, but I fixed that by setting the input buttons again inside MAME itself. Side note; since I'm stubborn and am one of those people that stays up all night until I solve a technical problem (habit I built from my day job lol) I found another work around- I ended up finding that retroarch can play MAME games (out of all the cores, only the MAME 2010 libretro core works for me! As usual, there's always a downside- the resolution with retroarch looks really bad compared to using MAME itself. Below are some screen shot comparisons for fun: Here is retroarch: Here is MAME: I read that retroarch can allow for internal resolution changes if you go to the core options, but when I checked there were no options available from what I can see; you can only save or load configs. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place? If I can, I think it'd be more ideal to have retroarch play my MAME games, I prefer retroarch as I'm sure a lot of others do too! Anyways, since I got into all this emulation stuff a few weeks ago (thanks to a friend that intro'd me to it) it's been a lot of fun. Definitely some bang your head on the wall moments, but all the problem solving is super gratifying and setting up your dream arcade/retro setup in LB is a ton of fun! I'm planning on building a whole arcade machine for our game room in the next 1-2 weeks, I'm thinking of going with a DIY kit from these guys: Home - Game Room Solutions

As a work around for now, I created a new emulator in LB from scratch and imported my entire Games/MAME/Roms directory as ROMS in LB, I have them showing up in my LB library, but when I try to run them nothing happens. I can run games no problem within MAME itself, but of course I need them to launch from LB and Big Box. Here's a screen of my emulator settings, maybe there's a box ticked or unticked that is wrong? I'm not sure and I'm coming up empty on google searches. I would use the full MAME importer (worked perfect a week or so ago) but since the error from my previous post blocks the process, I'm trying to avoid the auto MAME importer method and just manually import my MAME roms like NES, Genesis, Saturn, etc. Something else that's really weird is that when I imported the ROMS manually, it asked me to create the typical MAME playlists; although it created them, they are all empty..... I know I'm making some newbie mistakes, I just can't figure out what, but I bet it's something obvious! Appreciate the help everyone!

I'm fairly new to Launchbox, emulation, and MAME in general, only about 3 weeks into this at the moment. A week ago I setup MAME on one machine with LB with no problem, I was happy to see how automated the process is. This time I tried again on another machine, and I'm coming across this error that stops the entire process of setting up MAME in LB: I have no idea what causes this or how to solve it, hoping someone here can share some insight into this error?

thanks @neil9000! I acutally discovered this on my own a little later and meant to post a quick update on here sorry! I think I ended up watching one of ETA Prime's youtube videos (those are so good, I've been learning a lot from them). I'm not sure if this is the place for feedback, but I thought It might be helpful to share my thoughts from the point of view of someone with fresh eyes getting into both emulators/retro gaming and Launchbox for the first time. Launchbox has been awesome, and incredibly easy to use, so much so I purchased Big Box since it was completely worth it. With so much being so user friendly and automated, I was surprised when platform videos didn't work in BB. It took me some research to find that the user is expected to go and manually tell LB to download and install platform media as an extra step. That I guess was where I got hung up since I got used to the ROM import wizard walking me through getting media for the individual games, I guess I assumed it would do the same for platforms. For example, if I'm importing ROMs for Sega Genesis, LB is smart enough to know I'm importing Genesis games and actually sets up a new platform with a category and everything, and even intelligently downloads the game art- but leaves out any mention or attempt to grab the Genesis platform media- the user needs to know to finish the import wizard, then go to Tools>Download>platform media, etc. and go through another wizard for that step. Looking back now it's not a big deal and once you "know" it's as easy as a few clicks, but for someone totally new- when you open BB and your screen is black and the menu appears "broken" there's a lot of confusion at that moment; not sure if others ended up at that same path, but it happened to me and thought I'd share, maybe someone finds this info helpful. Otherwise I'm super stoked and am crazy excited to build my own retro gaming setup in our game room- my girlfriend doesn't get what I'm doing, but when I'm done and have light guns working and all that she's gonna lose her shit!

Hi I just purchased big box and installed this theme, but for some reason it just shows a black screen. The wheel works, but as I cycle through systems, it's just a black screen with nothing. The preview that shows with music and everything in the bog box manage themes menu looks awesome, but once installed I'm getting something incomplete. I'm sure it's something I'm doing on my end or I'm missing something... I just started working with Launchbox a couple of weekends ago, like most people decided to build an arcade setup at home- liked Launchbox so much I purchased the Big Box license. Everything has worked pretty much perfect, but this is the first hiccup I've encountered so far. Any help much appreciated! I attached a screenshot showing the problem: